


Let Your Heart Hold Fast

by Sanctuaria



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Domestic, Angst with a Happy Ending, Cancer, Coulson has cancer but he lives I promise, Dad Phil Coulson, F/F, F/M, Fluff, Graduation, Hurt/Comfort, I didn’t get a graduation so Skimmons gets one instead, Panic Attacks, mama may, philindaisy, skimmons - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-17
Updated: 2020-08-17
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:20:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25950511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sanctuaria/pseuds/Sanctuaria
Summary: A white noise filled Daisy’s ears, drowning everything out except the heartbeat that pounded through her head.No.No, it couldn’t be.He was fine.Her dad wasfine, he’d beaten it two years ago, and—
Relationships: Deke Shaw & Skye | Daisy Johnson, Jemma Simmons/Skye | Daisy Johnson, Phil Coulson/Melinda May
Comments: 53
Kudos: 91
Collections: AOS AU August 2020





	Let Your Heart Hold Fast

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Bubblebirdie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bubblebirdie/gifts).



> Based off a prompt from Bubblebirdie; I hope you like it and sorry it took me so long <3 This also counts as my contribution to AoS AU August for Day 17: Domestic AU because two birds, one stone ;)
> 
> Special thank-you to Lil’s lives and Jeff sitting on his frat-boy couch while the rest of them have nice adult apartments for the inspiration for Deke here. 
> 
> Jeff, we love you, and never change.
> 
> Title from “Let Your Heart Hold Fast” by Fort Atlantic.

The door slammed shut behind her a little harder than she meant it to, a stupid spring-loaded thing that had taken almost her whole body weight to get open. Sighing, she tilted her head upwards toward the warmth of the sunlight, eyes closing slightly in appreciation and as they adjusted to the brightness of the outdoors compared to the CompSci building, a squat beige-colored building probably named after some racist old white dude for his large monetary contributions to the university and the place where she, a CompSci major, spent most of her time. Daisy rolled her shoulders underneath her backpack, then began the walk across the campus back toward her apartment. There were a few other college students still milling around, but Spring Break had started last Friday and she had only stayed on campus to finish out a research project for Professor Hand, notorious hard-ass but also a pretty great faculty mentor.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket and for a brief moment her smile widened, before remembering that it was currently 1AM in Sheffield where Jemma was at home visiting her parents and thus it wasn’t likely to be her girlfriend.

Daisy pulled it out to see her mom’s face covering the screen of her phone, a Melinda May patented murder-stare that she had been lucky enough to capture on camera at age seventeen, returning home sheepishly after sneaking out at some ungodly hour the night before. Daisy grinned fondly at her mother’s flared nostrils before answering the phone. “Hey Mom, what’s up?”

“Hey, Dais.” May’s voice was soft, and Daisy immediately stopped walking, all of her senses on alert.

“Mom?”

“Do you have a few minutes to talk?” May asked, only increasing the pit of fear in her chest.

“Mom…what’s wrong?”

“You know your father had his appointment with the oncologist last week,” May said evenly. “The results of his tests came back today, and the cancer has come back.”

A white noise filled Daisy’s ears, drowning everything out except the heartbeat that pounded through her head.

No.

No, it couldn’t be.

He was fine.

Her dad was _fine_ , he’d beaten it two years ago, and—

May was still talking, but Daisy was unable to process any of the words as her mind spun out of control. Her teeth bit sharply into the inside of her cheek, filling her mouth with the sharp tang of blood. She vaguely recognized an upward lilt at the end of her mom’s sentence, a question, and mumbled something back, hanging up the phone.

He’d been in complete remission for two years, he couldn’t—it couldn’t just—

Daisy swallowed back a sob, her breaths coming in shallow pants now. Jemma. Jemma with her pre-med and her cups of tea and her waiting arms. Jemma would know what to do. She scrolled through her phone’s contact list with shaking fingers before remembering that Jemma wasn’t here, wasn’t in this country, wasn’t even on this continent. There was nothing she could do. And their other apartmentmate-slash-best-friend, Fitz, was back in Scotland for spring break.

Daisy’s finger trembled, hitting another contact before holding the phone up to her ear. “Hey, Daisy, what’s up?” he picked up on the third ring.

“Deke,” she gulped out. “Deke, can you—?”

“Daisy, what’s wrong?” he asked, voice suddenly serious.

Her throat closed up, choking her, her head spinning and the world turning hazy around her. She tried to get out more words but managed nothing more than a strangled gasp. “Daisy?” she heard him ask. “Daisy?”

“Help,” she ground out. Her knees gave out beneath her and she fell to the sidewalk, pain lancing up her tailbone.

“I’ll come get you,” Deke said immediately. “Are you at your apartment? Where are you?”

“No, I’m—I’m—”

“Okay, um—it’s okay, just describe what you see,” he said. “Take a deep breath, Daisy. What do you see?”

The road, the street. The lightpole a few feet away. Grass. Her dad’s face in that hospital bed, pale and haggard, tubes up his nose and through his arms…

“The Chem building,” Daisy gasped out, latching onto it.

“Okay. Okay, I’ll be there in two minutes, Daisy, just stay there,” Deke said, and she heard the jingle of keys through the tinny phone speaker. “Stay on the line, okay?”

The phone slipped from her grasp, dropping a foot to clatter on the concrete, face up. Darkness encroached on the edges of her vision; she just couldn’t get enough air… She clutched at her sides as if that would relieve the pressure mounting within her.

Her father, crying at the kitchen table with her mother when they thought she couldn’t see…

Her father, fingers shaking with more than his illness as he slipped a sealed letter into her hands. _“It basically just says how proud I am of you…”_

Her father, passed out on the couch the time she’d thought he was dead and run over to him, screaming and shaking his shoulder until his eyes opened, confused and bewildered and then so, so sad…

A loud screeching sound filled her ears, and then maybe the banging of a car door before hands were on her. “Daisy!” Nimble fingers gently pulled her hands away from her face and Deke’s blurry one swam in front of her. “Daisy, I’m here. What’s wrong?”

She opened her mouth but failed to form words, gasping for air and swallowing a gulp of it instead, choking.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Deke said quickly. “I’m just gonna sit down right next you. It’s gonna be okay.” Her fingernails bit into her palms as she nodded, still struggling for breath. “Look at me,” he said, and she did, panicked brown eyes meeting wide gray ones. “Try to match my breathing, okay? In….and out. It’s okay.” He modeled it dramatically and she tried to follow, tried to settle her panting into something more stable. “Give me your hands,” Deke said, and even through the panic she managed to give him a questioning look. “Not like that!” he yelped. “I’m just gonna try to ground you.” 

Daisy forcibly unclenched her clammy hands and thrust them at him, feeling him grasp them in his and begin to draw patterns into the back of them with his thumbs. His callouses rubbed roughly against her skin.

“Breathe,” he reminded her, and she sucked in another breath. “Okay?” Deke asked.

She managed a nod. “Yeah.” Another breath, in and out, another strange pattern on the back of her hands, the unpredictability of it somehow distracting her from the giant pounding in her chest. In, and out.

In, and out.

Time blurred, but maybe now she was capable of words, of explaining.

In, and out.

“M-my dad,” she gulped. “The cancer came back and—and—”

“Oh, Daisy,” Deke said, sympathy pooling in his gray eyes.

“I just—” Her breathing had steadied slightly now. “I just—I have to go home but I _can’t_.” She met his gaze, mouth twisting as a fresh round of tears marred her vision. “Deke, I can’t.” In, out. “What if it’s like before? I can’t go through this again, I can’t see him like that again.”

Deke just squeezed her fingers.

“I have to. I need to. I _want_ to,” Daisy murmured. “But I’m just so scared. And I’m scared if—if I wait even a couple minutes that—that it’ll be too late, even though I know it’s stupid—and if I really thought that I should have left already—instead of doing _this_ —”

“It’s not stupid,” Deke said. “I promise you it’s not.”

Daisy nodded, taking a shuddering breath, then another, feeling some of the sensation coming back to her limbs. She pulled one of her hands from his to wipe her eyes and he let go of the other one easily. The panic was fading into the background now, leaving her shaky and jittery but vaguely functional.

A sudden wave of embarrassment washed over her. “Sorry. Sorry to—” She makes a vague gesture with her hand. “Thank you.”

“Anytime,” he said softly, and she knew he meant it. “I’ll take you home?”

“If—if it’s not too much trouble?” Daisy asked, pushing herself up from the curb and brushing off the little bits of dirt and rock clinging to her clothes where she’d sat on the concrete.

He shook his head, heading for the car that Daisy had just realized was in front of them, pulled haphazardly to the side of the road and still running, keys in the ignition—a beat up old white sedan with leather seats, a dent as wide as she was in the passenger side door, the bumper coming loose on one end, and a suspicious-looking black mark on the hood. It was very frat-boy, and very quintessentially _Deke_.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” he told her, following her gaze.

She managed to get her lips to quirk upward. “It looks like a death trap.”

“Shut up,” he laughed, rolling his eyes, though he mostly seemed relieved that she was recovered enough to make a joke. He climbed into the driver’s seat as she did the same on the passenger side. They rode mostly in silence except for her sharp intake of breath when he nearly ran a red light—“It was totally yellow!”—andwhile he drove, Daisy mentally ran through a checklist of things to pack, scratching her nails over the inside of her palms.

_Hair brush, deodorant, razor, phone charger, clothes—no, I have clothes at home—laptop charger, hair brush—wait, did I already say hairbrush?—oh, I should wear the black jacket Dad got me, he loves that jacket—Dad—_

Deke stopped the car outside her apartment building, and Daisy pulled on the door handle. “Thank you for the ride,” she said again, taking a shaky breath.

“What?” he asked, nonplussed. “No, I’m driving you all the way to your parents. _Home_. I just figured you needed to get some stuff first.”

She stared at him. “I can’t ask you to—Deke, it’s _four hours away_.”

“Then we better get going,” he replied with a shrug of his shoulders, eyes completely serious. “Pack some clothes. Don’t forget your toothbrush.”

_Shit, toothbrush._

“ _Deke_ ,” Daisy tried uncertainly.

“Daisy.”

She sighed, then met his eyes with a small, grateful smile. “I’ll be right back with my stuff.”

* * *

He walked her to the door in the semi-darkness. Her cheeks ached slightly, both from the crying and the strange amount of laughing she’d done in the car as he tried to keep her mind off things, from the—horrible—impression he’d done of Fitz nearly setting the engineering lab on fire to the—slightly better but still horrific—one of Jemma talking animatedly about cuttlefish and chromatophores, a lecture Daisy had heard a billion times, and apparently Deke had too.

She stopped on the doorstep, then threw her arms around his shoulders in a hug. “Thank you.”

“Of course,” he told her easily. “I’ll be back to pick you up in a week. Let me know what would be a good time.”

“You don’t have to—”

“Yeah, yeah,” he waved her off. “Good luck.”

“Thanks.” She watched him take off back down the path to the street, wondering when she had become quite such good friends with Fitz’s weird American cousin, and was interrupted only when the front door opened behind her.

“Daisy,” May greeted her. Her mother’s dark eyes appraised her quickly up and down, then slid to where Deke was getting back in his car.“I’m sorry for scaring you, enough that you would come home in that old rust-bucket,” she said, lifting an eyebrow. “Did something happen to your car in the last two months that you failed to tell me?”

“I was upset, okay?” Daisy huffed, knowing that was her mom’s way of saying she was glad to see her. “Where’s Dad?”

“Living room,” May told her, something in her eyes softening. She drew Daisy into a hug that she practically melted into, clinging to her despite the fact she was at least two inches taller than her mom and had been for several years.

“Is he…?” Daisy whispered.

“He’s strong, Dais,” she promised back before giving her a prod in that direction.

She walked forward on leaden feet, the lump in her throat returning full force, unsure about what she was about to find.

How…how _sick_ he would look.

Her dad smiled up at her from his seat on the couch, warm and welcoming. His face was worn with a clear five o’clock shadow, but his cheeks had color in them, and the top of his head still had the hair he’d regrown since the last round of chemotherapy.

Daisy’s heart caught in her chest.

He looked _okay_.

“Dad,” Daisy said, falling into his arms. They closed around her as she hugged him tightly, enveloping in the familiar smell of his blue soap.

“Sorry to drag you away from school,” he said, muffled by her hair. “Even if it is Spring Break.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Daisy told him when she finally pulled away, scrubbing the sleeve of her sweater over her eyes with a sniffle. “It’s…it’s really back?” He nodded. “But I thought you were in remission,” she said, her voice sounding like that of a small child even to her own ears.

“I was,” he said gently. “But it came back, different this time—the tests we’ve been doing didn’t catch it until now.”

“Did—didn’t catch it?” Daisy asked, a new spike of fear driving through her heart, a rush of cold through her limbs. She looked helplessly between him and her mom, who was standing in the doorway with her arms crossed, dark eyes sad. “What are you saying. Are you—are you—?”

“It’s stage 3,” he told her.

Stage 3.

_Stage 3._

“I just—” Daisy flailed for the words to describe what she was feeling, the utter devastation she was feeling. “I thought it was over,” she whispered brokenly.

“We wanted to tell you that part in person,” May said, “because it is different. The treatments, the risks, they’ll all be more…severe.” Her voice shook slightly as she said it, and that more than anything told Daisy how serious this was.

He could die.

She could lose him, forever.

She’d spent months feeling like she was on the cusp of it last time, feeling like she was cracking apart from the inside, only to be told that this time would be _worse_.

“Well, I’m going to stay in person,” Daisy forced out, a hint of defiance in her tone. Determination and righteous anger at the universe for causing this were the only things that could cut through the fear. “I can’t go back, not like this, I barely did it in sophomore year the first time and that was stage 2, I—”

“You are going back to college,” Phil said sternly. “We have all week to spend together, but you’re not missing class, Daisy. Your mother and I are perfectly capable of managing on our own, and you have your own life that you need to focus on, one that’s just beginning.”

“I can’t just walk away and never know if I’m missing my last chance to say goodbye,” Daisy protested. “…I’m not ready to lose you, Dad.”

“You are going to live your life,” he insisted, just as calm. He took her hands in his as she shook her head, frustrated tears filling her eyes and her bottom lip caught between her teeth. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“You can’t promise that,” she told him. “I’m not a kid anymore, you can’t—”

“Too bad, because I am,” her dad said, a rare steel in his blue eyes. His hands tightened around hers. “I am promising that. I will be there at your graduation in June. Okay?”

She could only sit there, tears streaming down her face, wanting so desperately for it to be true. But sometimes hoping for something and losing it hurt more than never hoping for anything.

“Okay?” he asked again, gaze firm.

She wanted to believe him.

“Okay,” she said, collapsing into him again. “I love you, Dad. So much.”

“I love you too, Dais.”

* * *

Three Months Later

“ _I’m so proud of you!!!_ ” Jemma’s warm body crashed into hers with all the force of a full sprint across the field, knocking Daisy’s cap askew and nearly sending them both tumbling to the ground. Daisy staggered, laughing, and hugged her back with all her might.

“Proud of me, with my one measly CompSci degree?” she teased once they had righted themselves. “Miss pre-med BioChem double major with enough credits for half a master’s?”

“Oh, stop it,” Jemma told her, reaching up to fix Daisy’s graduation cap. Daisy sneakily pulled her in for a kiss instead, Jemma’s smartly pinned one knocking hers off altogether, making them both giggle. “I might’ve had a PhD by now if it wasn’t for you constantly roping me into your bad girl shenanigans…”

Daisy grinned, rolling her eyes. “You know you enjoyed them.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Jemma said, leaning in to kiss her again. Their lips had no more than brushed before two familiar figures in the stands caught Daisy’s eye and she pulled away, grabbing her fallen hat from the ground and jamming it over her head.

“I see my parents,” Daisy said, tugging on Jemma’s hand. The sprinted across the field together, Daisy’s cap flying off again and making them chase it—“I _told_ you you should have pinned it, Dais, proper preparation is essential to—”

“Mom!” Daisy she shouted, releasing Jemma’s hand just in time to barrel into her mother, who greeted her with a low “oof.”

She turned to the man standing next to her, a little thinner, maybe, a little less hair, but still—

“Congratulations, Daisy.”

“Dad!” she said, engulfing him in a hug as well, grad cap tucked safely under one arm.

“Told you I’d be here,” he whispered into her ear as he held her tight. Tears pricked her eyes, and Daisy gave a watery laugh, nodding as they separated.

“Good to see you again, Mr. Coulson, sir,” Jemma greeted him, smiling widely.

“You don’t have to call me ‘sir,’” he assured her.

“Oh, right, sorry,” Jemma laughed. She turned to May, exchanging her own hug with her. “Good to see you too, Melinda…”

Phil stopped, confused. “Wait, how come she’s ‘Melinda’ and I’m—”

May smirked. “Be less intimidating to your daughter’s girlfriend.”

He looked her up and down, his terrifying, five-foot-four wife with a glare that had been known to send unfortunate door-to-door solicitors running, never to approach their house again. “Sure, Mel. I’ll work on that.” He turned back to Jemma. “Congratulations on graduating to you as well, _Miss Simmons_ , although from what we hear that was never really in question.”

“Hey, mine wasn’t either!” Daisy protested. She pulled Jemma close, wrapping one arm around her waist. “And it’ll be _Dr._ Simmons soon,” she teased proudly.

May raised an eyebrow. “You know, Daisy, it’s not too late for _you_ to get a doctorate or an MD…”

“Ugh, Mom.” She rolled her eyes. “Don’t give in to the stereotype.”

“Two doctors just means both of us drowning in student loans,” Jemma said with a wink.

Her dad’s eyes twinkled at her. “One hacker—sorry, _hacktivist_ —and one doctor sounds like the perfect pairing to me.”

“Aw, thanks, Dad,” Daisy said, as he reached over to ruffle her hair like he used to when she was a child barely coming up to his waist. “Hopefully you’ll still think so when I tell you about my friend Deke’s startup idea that I’m thinking about helping him out with…he’s really into this thing called the corporate-social responsibility movement, and…”

**Author's Note:**

> Any and all feedback appreciated <3
> 
> I did *very* minimal cancer research for this, so my apologies if I got anything wrong. Inspiration was mostly pulled from my own experiences with my father's medical scare when I was in high school, so hopefully the feelings in this are at least accurate even if the medical stuff is not ;)


End file.
